Yet another Hacker News

21 points xyproto 1 day ago 4 comments

_dain_ 34 minutes ago | parent

>The very first systems programming language I ever learned was Rust. This is uncommon compared to many other programmers; you're more likely to find someone who learned C or C++ first before coming to Rust.

It's becoming increasingly common. Rust is my first systems programming language too. I tried to learn C a few years ago but I found it too austere and prickly, which put me off.

ReDress 31 minutes ago | parent

Probably because C and C++ are mostly used in system and desktop development.

Rust is taking steps or has been taking steps in this direction too.

It's not surprising that a lot of experienced systems and desktop development engineers looking to getting their hands on the newest tool already have experience or at least familiarity with C and C++.

ReDress 34 minutes ago | parent

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a wild guess.

That boolean is actually mostly an extension of the integer system whereby we now have an integer type that stores only one bit.

Whereby the bit stored either results in a 'true' or 'false' value.

Anyways, I know booleans are useful in systems development when you have strict memory / storage constrains / bandwidth (networks).

Yeah, that works for me.

uecker 21 minutes ago | parent

Any tutorial for C should explain compiler warnings and other tools that help make code safer. In C, you do not rely on the language specification but on tooling. Especially for Rust programmers, this needs to be explained more explicitly. And of course, you can build abstractions using types in C. So a tutorial should also focus on that, and perhaps not start with a low-level string reversal function.